A reader asks: Why is Linux still not as user friendly as the two other main OSes with all the people developing for Linux? Is it because it is mainly developed by geeks?
My initial feeling when reading this question was that it was kind of a throwaway, kind of a slam in disguise as a genuine question. But the more I thought about it, the more intrigued I felt. There truly are a large amount of resources being dedicated to the development of Linux and its operating system halo (DEs, drivers, apps, etc). Some of these resources are from large companies (IBM, Red Hat, Novell). Why isn't Linux more user-friendly? Is this an inherent limitation with open source software?

Oddly enough, what you're talking about is BeOS. Unix inspired and very consistent.

BeOS was more of a POSIX-supporting operating system with a command line tool. BeOS and Haiku are not really Unix-inspired per se; more like POSIX-respected.

From a Haiku development member: BeOS was only "unix-like" in that it shipped with a bash shell and a full complement of commandline utilities. It also sported a relatively good POSIX compliance layer (Haiku is much better even)... but these do not make "UNIX", and that's where the similarity to UNIX pretty much ends.